[Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)

Mark Hahn hahn at mcmaster.ca
Fri Apr 10 11:18:22 PDT 2009


>> in other words, with a normal all-precompiled distro, dkms still seems
>> redundant.
>
> True, but when you add something like the NVidia proprietary drivers
> which have a kernel component and aren't a part any distro due to
> licensing/distribution restrictions, DKMS is a fantastic.

you missed me there.  I'm sitting at a f10 machine which has 
gets the nvidia binary kernel module auto-updated with each kernel.
sure, it's the rpmfusion-nonfree repo rather than fedora itself (or nvidia).

to me, I would think that a vendor would want to have some set 
of baseline distros, and simply maintain their add-in drivers up-to-date
wrt distro kernel updates.  to permit testing, for instance.
using dkms does indeed allow more flexibility, but I'm guessing 
that there's some increase in unexpected results (such as rebuild failures).

otoh, I can't think of why yum couldn't trigger rebuilds itself as part
of resolving dependencies.  maybe it does already...

I don't think it would be hard to make an RPM that had the minimal smarts
to check for an updated NV blob and rebuild appropriately.  ideally,
NV would just do that themselves, and make it available via a yum repo.



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